Lisp development with macros faster than Python development?..

[Kay Schluehr]

Kirk Job Sluder schrieb:
> "Kay Schluehr" <kay.schluehr at gmx.net> writes:
>
> > This might be a great self experience for some "great hackers" but just
> > annoying for others who used to work with modular standard librarys and
> > think that the border of the language and an application should be
> > somehow fixed to enable those.
>
> In what way do lisp macros prevent the creation of modular libraries?
> Common Lisp does does have mechanisms for library namespaces, and in
> practice a macro contained within a library is not that much different
> from a function contained in a library or a class contained in a
> library. Macros just provide another mechanism for creating useful
> domain-specific abstractions.

To be honest I don't understand what a "domain-specific abstraction"
could be? What is the benefit of abstractions if they are not
abstracting from particular domain specific stuff?

> The primary advantage to macros is that
> you can create abstractions with functionality that is not easily
> described as either a function or a class definition.

As long as macros are used to create new language features such as an
object system like CLOS this technique may be perfectly justified for
language developers ( ! ) but I still consider it as a bad idea to
muddle the language development and the application development, that
seems to be the favourite programming style of Paul Graham. On the
other hand thinking about language development as a certain application
domain I find nothing wrong with the idea that it once reaches somehow
a state of a mature product that should not be altered in arbitrary
manner for the sake of a large user community.

Kay